Go Ask Tom Hanks

So, continuing (sorta) my return-to-blogging warmup from the other day, I wanna talk about a series most of you have probably never watched: Casual.

I’m a huge fan of Jason Reitman. I would fuck Up in the Air if I could, and I’m in the narrow minority who loved both Young Adult and Men, Women and Children. I respect him to the point that I don’t even care that he hated our script for Diminuendo.

(Full non-disclosure; he is, to date, the only person I’m aware of to have this reaction. In fact, everyone else has been ridiculously positive. Also, no, I won’t tell you what he said or how we got it to him).

I love his fucked up situational awareness and train-wreck characters. So, I thought Casual, being his series, might be worth a look. And it was. Until it wasn’t.

Look, I knew we were in for a show filled with awful people doing awful things they don’t know are awful. I expected that, and wasn’t disappointed for the most part. Until the end of season one. Earlier in the season, Alex, the lead trainwreck, adopts a chocolate lab puppy. In that arc, he wisely realizes he can’t even care for himself, much less a dog, and returns the puppy to the store.

The writers, apparently out of ideas for what else to do to end the season, brought that dog back into the story at the end of the season for no reason except to kill him offscreen. So they can make a joke about it. And it’s really, really not fucking okay. It is literally a pointless, unmotivated moment of ugliness that the character can simply never recover from. In the context of the real world, it doesn’t even make sense. A whole lot of things that would never happen have to happen for this puppy to be dead.

People who know me understand my love for animals. If you’re gonna kill an animal in a story, it needs to be motivated. Important. And I will still never forget. Game of Thrones, for example, will never make me care what happens to Sansa, no matter what abuse she suffers, simply because she was responsible for Lady being killed. To paraphrase Don Colreone, “This, I do not forgive.”

So, yeah, Jason? You can do better. And Casual, as an entity, can blow me. I can only hope that Hulu cancels it after season two since we are apparently the only people watching it anyway.